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Untitled contribution in the “Sense of Place” chapter of Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers, 20–21. From the archives of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. New York, Bloomsbury, 2000. “When you’re writing,” Mailer says in his preface to this brief excerpt describing Provincetown in the late fall from Tough Guys Don’t Dance (84.17), “there’s nothing more difficult than to come up with a good description of place.”